"Naw," Remo said. "We've screwed around enough. I think we're going to have to start picking up the pace."
He headed back to the jeep. Heine followed reluctantly.
Chapter 23
In spite of the cold weather, they found the digging easy. The nearness of the small stream kept the ground where they worked much damper than the rest of the forest floor.
The skinheads were caked with slippery brown mud. They grumbled among themselves with each shovelful of rich, cold earth they overturned.
The pile of displaced slimy sod had grown large over the past two hours. The Master of Sinanju remained at a cautious distance, ever aware of even the slightest dollop of mud that might fly his way. Whenever a skinhead would overshoot the pile and send a speck of dirt near Chiun's brilliant yellow kimono, the Master of Sinanju would let out a horrified shriek.
Once, when a clod of dirt came perilously close to his brocade robe, Chiun had stomped over to the diggers and wrenched the shovel from the perpetrator's hands, clanging the young man over the head with the flat end of the metal spade. After that, both the skinhead and his companions had made an extra effort to keep the mud within the designated area.
Kluge had brought three small folding stools from the rental car, one for each of them. Chiun had refused the seat, preferring instead to stand as close as possible to the deepening hole. Heidi paced back and forth between the line of stools and Chiun. Only Adolf Kluge opted to sit.
Kluge was sitting there now, hands folded patiently across his precisely crossed knees. The only outward hint of any inner agitation the IV leader might have felt was at his mouth. Kluge's tongue darted forward with unswerving regularity, dampening his lower lip. It was a nervous habit he had picked up years before.
"Pah!" Chiun complained, spinning from the massive mound of jiggling mud. "It is too deep."
"That is the correct spot according to the map," Heidi said nodding. Arms crossed, she chewed one thumbnail anxiously as she watched lumps of mud fly up from the hole.
"Fifteen hundred years is a long time," Kluge suggested. He pointed at the marks in the surrounding uneven forest floor. "It appears as though the river ran directly through this area at one time. Surely sediment would have collected, covering it more deeply."
"But if the river was here, how did they build it to begin with?" Heidi asked.
"That which you call engineering was not invented for the convenience of this century," Chiun said impatiently. "Such a feat would not have been impossible. It would also explain the difficulty my ancestor had in finding the Hoard."
"I hope we have better luck than him," Heidi said. She continued to stare into the wide hole at the muddy riverbank.
The men dug for another half hour. Kluge was about to suggest that they should redraw the map, this time with more care, when a sharp clang emanated from the deep hole. It was followed by another.
Kluge got to his feet.
"There is something here!" one of the skinheads called from within the deep pit.
Kluge and Heidi looked at each other, neither of them certain what to do next. Heidi seemed genuinely surprised.
The Master of Sinanju was first to react. He flounced to the edge of the hole, looking in his jaundiced kimono like a huge yellow bird that had just spied a particularly succulent worm. He stopped at the muddy edge of the pit.
Only five skinheads could fit in the hole at one time. The area they had excavated was more than ten feet deep. The men inside were looking up from the bottom, their bodies coated with thick black mud.
"See?" one of the skinheads said.
He handed his shovel to one of the others and got to his soiled knees. With the palms of his filthy hands, he wiped away a pile of thick, gloppy mud, revealing a flat surface underneath. The men were standing atop what appeared to be a buried strip of sidewalk.
Kluge and Heidi came up behind Chiun.
"Clear off the rest!" the Master of Sinanju boomed. His eyes sparkled brightly.
The men did as they were told. More shovelfuls of mud had to be removed to clear the stone to its edges. It was found to be rectangular in shape.
Some of the blond-haired men brought buckets from one of the trucks. As the last of the dirt was hauled out, water was brought from the nearby stream. Lowering the pails into the hole, they washed the surface of the chiseled granite.
"I cannot read it," Kluge said. He strained to look down at the ancient letters. They appeared to be nothing more than a series of indecipherable slashes. He glanced at the Master of Sinanju for help.
Chiun's eyes had narrowed to narrow slits, swallowing up any small spark of hope in his hazel orbs. His mouth was a thin, furious line.
"Accursed fiend," Chiun hissed. There was far more menace in the softness of his tone than in a thousand screaming voices. "He dares mock the House of Sinanju from across the ages." His rage suddenly boiled over. "Villain! Cur! Fraud! Lying Hun thief!"
Like a crazed Olympic diver, Chiun flew down into the hole. A swirling, frenzied yellow tempest, he swatted vicious, angry hands at the skinheads still gathered below. The slime-coated men scurried up the muddy banks in fear.
Mindless of the grime, Chiun dropped to his knees atop the stone. It was as large as a big door. He pried slender fingers around its smooth edge.
"What does it say?" Kluge asked in wonder as he watched the aged Korean tear at the stone.
"I believe those are runic characters," Heidi said. Her eyes narrowed as she attempted to read what was visible around Chiun. They looked like random cat scratches. "I am not entirely unfamiliar with this. Those are bitter runes. They are intended to bring down evils upon enemies."
Kluge glanced from the scampering form of Chiun to Heidi. "This is not the storing place of the Nibelungen Hoard?" he asked. He could not mask his disappointment.
Heidi smiled tightly. "I am afraid not," she said. In the pit, the Master of Sinanju had pried up the massive flat stone, heaving it to one side. There was nothing beneath but a pile of mud-swamped rocks. "Aiieee!" Chiun screamed.
His hand flew toward one of the short sides of the stone. There was a sound like a thunderclap. As Kluge watched, the flat rock split in two long halves. Before the pieces had even fallen to the bottom of the pit, Chiun's pipestem legs shot out in two quick jabs. The halves split in half again, falling into smaller pieces. Chiun fired his tiny fists forward into the quarters, cracking the chunks of stone into ever smaller fragments. All the while, he screamed his anger and frustration at the mud walls of the deep, slick pit.
Kluge backed slowly away from the hole. Witnessing the awesome sight of the wizened Asian shattering a two-ton slab of rock as if it were made of glass, Kluge felt almost a little grateful that he hadn't been able to follow through on his plan to kill the Master of Sinanju. This lasted only as long as it took him to realize that the wealth he so coveted was not there. Without that money, there would be no reestablishing IV. The fifty-year-old ultrasecret Nazi organization was finished.
And along with it, Adolf Kluge.
This realization was only just beginning to sink in when Kluge spied the first figure creeping through the underbrush on the other side of the river.
He stiffened. Made an effort not to stare.
Kluge tried not to let the man know he had spotted him as he casually began to scan the surrounding flora.
There was another. And another.
Creeping forward, they were attempting to stay hidden in the winter woods. The men were all armed.
In the pit behind him, the Master of Sinanju continued to pound away at the diminishing chunks of rock. Dust and pebbles flew up out of the hole as if from some insane sculptor's underground studio. The tiny Korean's screams had grown less fierce with every passing second.
Kluge hardly noticed Chiun's tantrum any longer. Keeping his arms close to his sides and his movements subdued, he walked with forced casualness over to Heidi.
She was in the process of gathering up Kluge's three collapsible s
tools from where they had been propped on the forest floor. They were draped over her forearm as Kluge stepped up to her.
"We are being watched," he said in a measured tone.
She had been lost in thought, obviously thinking of the amount of gold she had lost.
"What?" she asked, perturbed. She handed the stools off to a waiting skinhead. "What are you talking about?"
Her answer exploded from across the small river. The first gunshot ripped through the torpid silence of the ancient forest.
The bullet caught the skinhead beside them square in the chest. The young man wheeled around, flinging the three stools into the air as he did so. They flew through the air, landing in a tangle of bushes near the heap of displaced mud.
The dead skinhead fell to the forest floor as the next bullet tore from the tangle of low plants across the river.
Kluge threw himself to the ground. His elbow slammed against a flat rock. He ignored the shooting pain in his arm as he half crawled, half pushed himself along the damp forest surface to the protection of a cluster of thick pine trees.
All around him, Kluge's mud-soaked neo-Nazi followers had drawn weapons. Ducking for cover themselves, they had begun to shoot blindly at their concealed attackers.
Gunfire erupted all around.
The men who had ambushed them were in no hurry to advance. They stayed at a distance, firing with care into the cluster of neo-Nazis. From his vantage point behind the trees, Kluge could see that the first man he had noticed wore the uniform of the German Federal Border Police. He skulked on the other side of the small tributary, popping into view every few seconds with a blast of automatic-weapon fire.
A volley of bullets ripped into the soft trunk of the tree above him, sending splinters of pulpy wood down onto Kluge's sandy hair.
Kluge glanced frantically the other way. Through the overgrown forest, he could barely glimpse his parked convoy of trucks. As he watched, the lead car began rolling off down the road. It was joined a moment later by several of the trucks. The Numbers were fleeing.
He was so shocked that he began to climb to his feet. A fresh hail of bullets made him reconsider. Dropping back to his belly, Adolf Kluge began crawling slowly through the tangle of bushes toward the road.
He got only a few feet before his injured elbow fell atop the toe of a boot. Kluge had no weapon. He rolled over onto his back, hands held up in surrender.
A group of men dressed in the drab uniforms of the Federal Border Police fanned around him. They grabbed Adolf Kluge by the arms, pulling him to his feet.
As the firefight continued to rage over near the river, the men spirited Kluge to the waiting line of trucks.
THE DETACHMENT of Federal Border Police had split up at the river, hoping to ensnare the entire band of neo-Nazis within their widely cast net.
Remo was on the other side of the river when he heard the first gunshot. It was followed almost immediately by a sustained firefight. He turned to Colonel Friedrich Heine.
"Who told them to start shooting?" Remo demanded.
"They are not authorized," Colonel Heine said angrily.
Remo didn't wait for more of an explanation. He began running through the woods toward the sound of the guns.
He broke into a small clearing on the side of the river opposite the neo-Nazis. He saw the deep mud hole beside the small man-made hill of displaced earth. Tiny puffs of dust rose from within the pit.
Colonel Heine came running up behind Remo, desperately short of breath. The firefight was blazing, with swarms of angry lead projectiles whizzing around his head as Heine slammed up against the thick trunk of a bullet-riddled tree. He pulled out his side arm.
"You," he demanded, pointing at one of his men crouching in the nearby bushes. "Who gave the order to fire?"
The man shrugged. "It simply happened, sir," he said.
Heine shook his head to Remo, fiercely apologetic. "Not all of these men are pro-Nazi," he explained. "Some are like me. Although I was hoping for a peaceful resolution."
"That's shot to hell right about now," Remo snarled.
The skinheads were entrenched on the other side of the river. The border police had only managed to pick off a few of them early on. The rest were dug in behind trees and boulders, preserving ammunition by firing in short, directed bursts at their attackers.
The border police had lost the element of surprise. They were hunkered down across the river, unable to advance on the skinheads. The other half of Heine's men appeared to have vanished.
It was an equally matched standoff.
Remo didn't seek cover like the others. He stood in the open near the river, dodging the occasional bullet that flew his way. He frowned as he looked across the river. He didn't see the Master of Sinanju anywhere. Nor Kluge or Heidi, for that matter.
"Get down!" Heine insisted. He was amazed that Remo had not yet been shot.
Remo didn't appear to hear the colonel. He sighed even as he sidestepped a violent burst from a skinhead's Uzi. "Leave it to the only American here to have to clean up this mess," he grumbled. Leaving Heine to splutter that he was committing suicide, Remo hopped onto a moss-slick stone that jutted up a foot out from the river's edge.
It wasn't far across. Though the water raced fast, it was more of an overgrown stream than a real river. Hopping from damp stone to damp stone, Remo bounded over to the other side in a few short leaps. He landed in a clump of brown weeds.
Remo hadn't taken more than two steps up the bank before a wild-eyed skinhead came screaming at him from out of a heavy thicket. The man wielded a large hunting knife before him. The scream was apparently meant to distract his victim as he plunged the knife home.
Without even missing a single step, Remo snatched the skinhead by the wrist. With a quick, fluid motion, he redirected the knife back and around. The young man's hand traced an elaborate circle in the air as the blade whirred back toward the attacker. It buried itself up to the hilt in the startled skinhead's unmuscled abdomen.
Striding forward, Remo flung the doubled-over body into his wake. The skinhead toppled into the weeds and then rolled over, splashing into the racing water. He floated only a few feet downstream before his body snagged on a rock. The river splashed over and around his lifeless form.
Remo continued onward, his expression grave. He had yet to see Chiun anywhere.
Judging from the gunfire, there weren't as many men in the woods around him as had left the inn during the wee hours of the morning. Some must have escaped when the shooting began. Realizing he might have been too hasty killing his first attacker, Remo sought out another skinhead.
He found one crouching amid a tangle of bushes. The man was firing shots from his assault rifle in random bursts at the police across the river. The slender barrel of his West German Gewehr jutted out from a tangle of laurel.
Coming up from the man's blind side, Remo wrapped his fingers around the gun barrel and yanked hard. The startled skinhead popped out from the bushes, still hanging on to the other end of his weapon. He seemed shocked to find someone else attached to his gun barrel.
"Okay, pfeffernusse," Remo began, unmindful of the young man's surprised expression. "Do you-?"
A loud series of gunshots sounded across the river. A cluster of crimson stains erupted across the skinhead's chest and stomach. His eyes rolled back in their sockets as his head lolled to one side. The man fell back to the bushes, propped up by the thick branches. He didn't move again.
"Hey, watch it!" Remo shouted to the border police. Their response was even more gunfire. So far, none of it was directed at him.
Dropping the man's weapon angrily, Remo went off in search of another skinhead.
His yelling alerted those close by of his presence. As Remo walked in the direction of the mountain of mud, a pair of skinheads who had been waiting in ambush leaped out of the bushes before and behind him.
This time Remo was unable to get out a single word before the men were mowed down by the police.
> "Dammit," Remo snapped as the pair of bodies fell.
This was obviously not going to work the way he planned. Taking a different tack, Remo dived into the bushes where his keen senses told him a cluster of neo-Nazis was hiding.
There were six of them.
Unfortunately they had witnessed the horrible deaths of the other men Remo had so far encountered. Not wanting to end up like their comrades, the men fled into the open as soon as Remo appeared before them. They were instantly fired upon by the border police and were slaughtered to a man. "Dammit, dammit, dammit," Remo griped.
He heard a scuffling somewhere before and above him. A single, rapid heartbeat filtered down through the thick pine branches. Boots scraped along rough bark.
Remo took a few steps forward. He found a lone skinhead hiding in a tree above the spot where the six men had been hunkered down. The man was attempting to hold on to the tree trunk while at the same time angling his rifle down at the top of Remo's head.
Before the man could fire, Remo reached up and grabbed him by his loose shoelace. He pulled.
The skinhead came crashing out of the tree like a clumsy fat bird, collapsing to the forest floor amid a pile of broken branches. Pine needles continued to rain down on him as he shook his head in groggy confusion.
The flurry of activity around the tree started a new wave of gunfire from across the river. Luckily for Remo, they were behind the broad tree trunk, safe from the bullets of the Federal Border Police.
"Speaky the English?" Remo asked the skinhead.
"Yes," the man answered fearfully. He shook some of the needles out of his hair. Though his eyes stayed locked with Remo's, his hand searched for his dropped gun.
"The old Korean who was with Kluge. Where is he?"
"There," the man said, nodding out toward the hole.
Remo looked out at the mound of earth. He raised a skeptical eyebrow.
Even as he did so, the skinhead was grabbing up his gun from the ground. Still seated, he spun around with the weapon, aiming it at Remo's exposed belly.
In a move so swift that it was almost blinding, Remo used one hand to pull the gun away from the man. As he was tossing the weapon away, he used his free hand to pull the skinhead to his feet.
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